Palm TX External Mic Review

By: Kris Keilhack
Sept 7, 2006

Palm’s TX is the company’s finest PDA in years—some would arguably call it the finest device in Palm’s history. With no successor or improved model on the horizon, many of the Palm OS faithful are considering the TX the “last stand” and doing everything possible to extract every bit of utility from a handheld that still comes up short in a few key areas.

One of the TX’s major shortcomings is the lack of an internal microphone. With internal Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, the TX would make for a fantastic VOIP solution and a strong alternative to a Treo. By basing the TX on the tired Tungsten E form factor, Palm saw fit not to bother spending a few R&D dollars to modify the design for an internal mic or a charge status LED. Enter the aftermarket: while a few users have successfully modded their TX’s to accommodate an internal microphone, the minds at www.talestuff.com / Tech Center Labs have produced a high-quality, mass-produced external microphone solution for the Palm TX.

Initial Impressions and Usability
I received a bare evaluation unit in an envelope that was devoid of any documentation so I cannot comment on the packaging.

Build quality was much, much higher than I was anticipating. A grade of plastic very similar the TX’s body has been used and the only noticeable difference is that the microphone module is jet black instead of the TX’s dark blue-black (Cobalt!?) color scheme. I was also worried that the microphone would be very wobbly and loosely attached to the TX’s Athena connector. Thankfully that is not the case. The attachment was so strong, in fact, that I was able to pick my TX by the microphone and stick it in my pocket (not a recommended action by any means)!

Since the TX lacks a bundled Palm voice recorder app, I downloaded the nifty freeware SoundRec application. It’s barebones but it gets the job done, is stable on the TX and can record to an SD card-what more does one need?

I spent a full workday using the TX to jot down memos while driving, talking on the phone and while driving. In informal testing against my 700p and its bundled Voice Recorder app, I noticed the TCL microphone to have a bit more background noise and to have slightly less sensitivity. I would rate the audio quality of the TCL microphone plus the SoundRec app comparable to an older OS 5.x Palm like the T|T or T|T2 but without the skipping audio.

In a nice touch the microphone housing appears to have cutouts on both the front and rear panels to ensure good sound pickup regardless of the placement of the TX.

Compatibility and Availability
This product is designed only for use on the Palm TX and Tungsten T5, Tungsten E2 owners are out of luck. Treo and LifeDrive owners, you already have a microphone so consider yourselves lucky!

Tech Center Labs sells the TX microphone directly on their web store for $14.95 plus shipping. They also sell a nifty new TX cradle that has a built-in microphone for $24.95 that might make a solid alternative to the overpriced Palm cradle. TCL also provides a very useful list of links to freeware VOIP, voice command and sound recording applications. Seeing the wide variety of programs available makes me even angrier at Palm for not making this basic feature standard on their “flagship” PDA!

I encounter no ill effects from using my TX in other apps with the microphone plugged in. In a pleasant twist, it requires no driver installation to function.

Pros:
- Reasonably priced
- VERY solid connection to the TX and good build quality
- Fair audio quality, considering audio capture is something the TX wasn’t designed for
- Good add-on solution for those that can live with the bulk and who are too cautious to attempt to mod their TX’s with an internal microphone
- Stable operation and no drivers required

Cons:
- Bulky and rather unattractive
- Fragile and potentially a likely candidate to lose/misplace

- Of questionable value to some TX users

This is a nicely designed product that works within the limitations of being an add-on, externally mounted solution. My only major complaint with this unit its potential fragility and the added bulk it brings to the TX’s otherwise svelte dimensions. Of course, this is no fault of Tech Center Labs. Palm’s penny-pinching when designing the TX is absolutely maddening. An internal microphone would have only added a few cents to the TX’s production costs yet increased its utility tenfold for many users. My compliments to TCL for going where Palm’s bean counters fear to tread!

RE: Nice idea!

RE: Nice idea!

ahhh.. brings back memories of those serial add-on speakers we used to buy to make up for Palm saving a few pennies by putting piezo speakers in the Palm 1 and 2... Or the silly wifi sled necessary for the Treo 600 and 650 because Palm didn't support it out of the box and won't write drivers.

RE: Nice idea!

What off building a facility that offers companies the choice to test their products in an environment designed to facilitate the choice to break each others stuff.

Why is this important? The purpose in building anything is for people. If we offer choices and later have people that want to break stuff so they can call their competitor's offering of poor quality is this harming the purpose?

If we offer a place where folks can do this, legally, rather than in jail will we have a more productive society?

Is hacking a choice that harms the purpose? If this choice takes place in a IPVPN controlled environment, will we have better results?

Building and enhancing choices seems to be a productive way to work too.

E-T

e-tellurian

Completing the e-com circle with a people driven we-com solutionWiFi & BT? No strings attachedwe_tellurian@canada.com

RE: Nice idea!

Libra, thanks for the acknowledgement! I was selling these for many months before they appeared on TCL, and knew it would be a short time before another person started to make them too.

We all know the groundwork for these came from Dmitry G. and his research into the innards of the TX. I threw my results right onto BrightHand (including pictures) as soon as I made a working unit just to share the info with my friends and fellow Palm enthusiasts.

Tony has a nice website up and I wish him well! I make them as a hobby, and enjoy making friends from all over the world!

RE: Pathetic

Can't disagree there...The company lacks innovation, in terms of both technical and marketing, that it's no wonder it earns ever declining revenue overtime. Perhaps we won't be seeing any more of Palm's devices the next one year or two. Quite sad, actually...

RE: Pathetic

AND - they were the *FIRST* PDA company to come up with the revolutionary idea of *REMOVING* important features from their high-end devices in order to out-do the competition!!! Just look at the poor shlebs with other PDAs - stuck with vibrating alarms, LEDs that work, proper placement of reset holes, and other useful items that Palm has cunningly removed. Next stop - monochrome screens!!!

What more innovation do you want from the (former) industry leader? Leading the way to the oblivion of the PDA platform!!

RE: Pathetic

The issue you are describing is that of capital. Some knew this would be an issue from a competitive perspective so we went about becoming aware and then offering more to do so our products did not start looking the same, with different "brand names".

A brand is built from the ground up. So one can see your thought on the choices becoming too one like.

You seem to have noticed many people like choices. Some choices are more expensive than others, partly to recover R&D resources.

E-T

e-tellurian

Completing the e-com circle with a people driven we-com solutionWiFi & BT? No strings attachedwe_tellurian@canada.com

RE: Pathetic

The issue you are describing is that of capital. Some knew this would be an issue from a competitive perspective so we went about becoming aware and then offering more to do so our products did not start looking the same, with different "brand names".

A brand is built from the ground up. So one can see your thought on the choices becoming too one like.

You seem to have noticed many people like choices. Some choices are more expensive than others, partly to recover R&D resources.

RE: Pathetic

Design ... Huh?

Nice product to fix another pathetic Palm Inc downgrade. But, I have to question the physical design of the mic. It looks like the Treo monster antenna protruding from the bottom, laying in wait to get broken or garner snickers from co-workers.

This cannot be the worlds most electronically challenged attachment, so why not make the physical design along the following line so that users would feel comfortable leaving it attached all the time. Not only that, but maybe "pass thru" electronic switching could allow the charging or syncing if the bottom of the device were the female athena connection? It could get a large market that way.

As long as we're talking about add-on hardware...

LiveFaith wrote:This cannot be the worlds most electronically challenged attachment, so why not make the physical design along the following line so that users would feel comfortable leaving it attached all the time. Not only that, but maybe "pass thru" electronic switching could allow the charging or syncing if the bottom of the device were the female athena connection?

Right. Then add a vibrator as someone else suggested. And a charging LED that doubles as an indicator for when you have an email or voicemail. Voicemail? Oh yeah. I forgot to mention: it's the return of the VisorPhone!

Lazy Palm design? Or cunning manipulation of the Palm Faithful?

Beersy, there's NO excuse (other than fear of cannibalizing Treo sales to frustrated PalmOS users desperate to upgrade aging hardware) for the TX not shipping with a microphone and decent speaker. All the hardware to turn the TX into a decent VoIP phone could fit into the current form factor:

Put a decent speaker where the "Palm" logo is, put the LED on the top left corner and shift the "Palm" logo + SD slot to the top right corner. [Try Photoshopping those changes.] Add a VoIP application and watch sales to enterprise + end users SKYROCKET. Of course the question remains whether or not such a device would hurt sales of more lucrative Treos. Probably would. I believe Palm has made a business decision to try and "force" all remaining PalmOS supporters to "upgrade" to Treos, so Palm's woeful lack of innovation in traditional PDAs is entirely intentional. (Even Palm could ship good hardware if it wanted to. The Tungsten C came out way back in April 2003 and has more impressive specs than anything Palm sells in 2006. Pathetic.)

RE: Design ... Huh?

David, that thing looks good, but would cost serious money to produce for the very few people who would ever buy one at this point. I don't think you were serious anyway, and I can't imagine how a vibrator could be hooked up externally. Dimitry G could probably tell us.

However, the overly large size of this external mic adapter is simply because that is how big a complete Athena connector is. The DIY'ers know that the only part of the plug that is necessary is the I/O sub-section and a tiny microphone. The mic could sit on the end of the I/O section, where the power plug is. Even using readily available parts, an external mic adapter can be made at well under half the size of the whole plug. But it won't look nice without some kind of casing, hence the huge size. But a company capable of doing all of the molding could make this mic adapter tiny.

In one of my "prototype" headset adapters, I cut off about 2/5th's of the case and still had room to put in mini 2.5 mm jack, a lot more wire, and a resistor. It's functional, but it isn't "pretty".

But the bottom line is that all of this was completely unnecessary if Palm hadn't been so stingy with the production in the first place. I do not believe that the inclusion of a microphone in the TX would have even cost them one US dollar, and it should have been much less since everything needed is already in the case except for the actual mic (which I can purchase for 66 cents retail). As soon as my warranty is up, that mic will be in my TX case. The speaker on the back may not be worthy of hi-fi music, but it should suffice for voice if someone were so inclined to hold it to their ear for VOIP phone calls.

(Incidentally, I'm wanting to play around with some other hardware adapter ideas. If anyone is interested in trading me some blank Gomadic Athena connectors for a "not-so-pretty" headset adapter, send me a private message. I won't talk about it here.)

RE: Design ... Huh?

RE: Design ... Huh?

Well... if it weren't for the software hackers Palm would have died about 1999 or so (did anyone really buy the PDA for the basic PIMs they included? - it didn't sync to anything except the hacked Clarisworks Palm used, and the fields were miserably lacking).

So maybe it's now the age for the hardware hackers to come full bloom to the aide of Palm. Palm doesn't seem to have shown much ingenuity in the Treo area, and the PDA realm is losing important features by the year - maybe it's time for a shout-out to Dmitry and some of the old timers to come and save Palm devices once again from their corporate overlords.

Why I left Palm

The lack of the voice recorder on the TX turned me away from PAlm for ever. In a way I owe Palm a huge THANKS as when I left Palm I look and fell in love with my Blackberry. The Blackberry has been the biggest help to me of any other device I use.

It is sad to see hwat is happening to the PDA market, it was so strong and growing like crazy and then, well it is dead!

RE: Why I left Palm

Blackberries have been eating up plenty of market that Palm could have had. And curiously, even PocketPC/ Windows Mobile is still around.

You don't maintain or gain market share by taking away stuff that people need and use - they'll look around for another solution and probably never come back. Palm seems to have learned from this that they should install and push Windows Mobile. I guess it's out of their hands now anyway.

RE: Design

People at Palm recognize that the optimal mobile screen for viewing movies and photos, surfing the web, or editing word or excel documents, is *much* larger than the optimal size for a smartphone, period.

Thus, there are two separate categories. This is indisputable.

(Of course, the PDA was *traditionally* an organizer, not a movie-viewing web-surfing word-editing digital media center. Those organizer functions are easily accomplished by a Treo. But that is irrelevant.)

So Palm decided to focus on the "truely portable movie- and photo-viewing, websurfing, word and excel editing" device market, and made the LifeDrive. The recognition of what PDAs are turning into was 100 correct: visionary, even. Even the realization that the new app launcher must be understandable even by an iPod user was visionary. Microsuck still doesn't get this.

Sadly the LifeDrive design was deeply flawed, which led to flawed execution. Quite simply, the LifeDrive idea was broken when someone decided that they would save a few bucks by stripping the RAM out. This meant they had to try to hack the OS to run from disk, causing a cascade of bugs and performance issues that crippled the device. Instead, the LifeDrive needed to have 64M of regular RAM with the HD showing up internally as "Card:0". This would have required few OS changes, and only minor applicaton tweaks to ensure everything worked well with the HD instead of flash cards.

Presumably, whichever suit made the decision to strip RAM from the LifeDrive then failed to accept their own error, and instead blamed the failure of LifeDrive on the *category* of "truely portable movie-viewing, photo-viewing, web-surfing, word- and excel-editing device". This is a mistake, akin to Apple's retreat from the original PDA market. If Palm can't own this category, someone else will. Ironically it might be Apple, who can add wifi and a larger screen to the iPod.

Why is the PDA market stagnating? Because Wince devices always sucked, and Palm don't have a product: they never corrected the fundamental design flaw in the flagship LifeDrive... it should *never* have run the OS from disk.

------"People who like M$ products tend to be insecure crowd-following newbies lacking in experience and imagination."

I wouldn't mess with reformatting if I were you: I've had mixed results with formatting SD cards over they years.

By the way, the 1GB SanDisk cards work great for watching movies with TCPMP... just wish I had a larger screen for widescreen mode... gonna get the LD for just that. I want the HD for my docs, and I'll run movies off the SD to save power.

P.S. Has anyone been keeping up with the threads on 1src where a few adventurous souls replaced the LD's Microdrive with a regular Sandisk 4gb CF card? The unit is MUCH faster with almost zero lag and even has improved stability. What a concept!

RE: Buggy Whip Add-On for a Dead Product Sector

D.O. actually makes sense, except for unnecessary pot shots at MS. MS only makes the software, not the hardware.

Surur

They said I only argued for the sake of arguing, but after an hour I convinced them they were wrong...Hey!! I made associate writer at PDA247. Come see my nattering over there!!www.clieuk.co.uk/wm.shtml

RE: Buggy Whip Add-On for a Dead Product Sector

They said I only argued for the sake of arguing, but after an hour I convinced them they were wrong...Hey!! I made associate writer at PDA247. Come see my nattering over there!!www.clieuk.co.uk/wm.shtml

RE: Buggy Whip Add-On for a Dead Product Sector

i say that this "dream LD" would still not have sold well and it wouldn't have put a dent into iPod or Treo sales. to say so is a huge stretch and wild speculation.

Can someone answer me this - why doesn't Apple leverage the iPod success into an iPhone? i would think the biitch would sell like hotcakes. carriers would be fighting each other for exclusivity. and Apple has to have some nice economies of scale given past iPod sales. Robust MP3 player, great brand/marketing, great style, great GUI, built-in user base, add some robust PIM features and a cellular radio and - voila. Maybe easier said than done? Maybe they're already on the project?

RE: Buggy Whip Add-On for a Dead Product Sector

Because it's a massively complex task to get through the carriers even assuming you have a fully functional "unlocked" device ready to go. There is a huge amount of relationship development, domain knowledge, experience, and infrastructure necessary to even play. Then you have lots and lots of testing, new hardware and software development, more testing, localizations, customizations, regulatory stuff, additional testing, support requirements, etc, ad nauseam. That's why Apple adopted a partner strategy.

------"People who like M$ products tend to be insecure crowd-following newbies lacking in experience and imagination."

They're already on it

Apple's (AAPL - commentary - Cramer's Take) phone designs are more ambitious than expected. And some say its business strategy may aim just as high.

Industry observers stalking the development of Apple's highly anticipated iPhone are abuzz over patent filings showing blueprints for a mobile device that also incorporates a number of functions like a PDA, music player, video player, game player, digital camera and GPS satellite location.

The patent filing, which includes two pages of sketches depicting several devices, covers a broad range of shapes and features.

"You can tell the legal team was involved, they covered all the bases," says American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu, referring to the breadth of possibilities presented in the filing. Wu issued a report Friday on Apple's iPhone plans...

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